Behind the theatre lay a flat, open area, choked with weeds now, but its shape so regular that I imagined this had once been a smooth and well-tended space. Columns marched around it, having once held up a roof of an arcade. What the area had been used for, I could not tell.
Grenville was nowhere in sight. My heart thumped with worry as we searched, and I paused to cup my hands around my mouth and shout for him.
No answer. We reached the city wall at the other end of the open area. To the left, volcanic rubble was piled high, this earth not yet excavated. Baldini, without pause, took us along the wall to our right, following it to a tumbledown temple where digging commenced.
The men working here regarded us in surprise and we hastened to them. Baldini spoke to them in rapid Italian, but they shook heads and appeared puzzled. They’d seen no one.
Baldini waved us on. I thought he’d take us to the forum, open ground a man could run over to make his surest way for the gates and out. Instead, he herded us back more or less the way we’d come, halting at a steep slope pressed between the flat space and the large theatre. The concave bowl of land and the regular stones ringing it spoke of another theatre, smaller than the other and much more ruined.
Baldini led us down the slope toward what must have been the stage. Instead of elegant stone screens, this stage sported a tall brick wall with only a few narrow openings in it. Baldini, agile, scrambled up the stage and through one of these gaps, Brewster and I more carefully coming behind.
Beyond this theatre lay a maze of walls, some cleared down to their bases, others buried in dirt and fallen stones. Baldini wove his way through these, perfectly at home.
“Keep him in sight, guv,” Brewster said behind me.
I understood why. Baldini could easily vanish, leaving us stumbling through this labyrinth. We might exhaust ourselves trying to find the way out, rendering us vulnerable to attack. Baldini, after all, was loyal to Trevisan, a man we’d disparaged.
I followed Baldini’s hat as it bobbed among the ruins. To his credit, he slowed and waited for us when he realized he’d left us behind.
“What was this place?” I asked, waving at the walls close around us.
“Some believe for gladiators,” Baldini answered, barely out of breath. “They trained in the place with the pillars we went through and slept in these cells.” He indicated an opening to a very small room. As famous as some gladiators had become, they’d in the end been slaves, living in cramped quarters with little hope of freedom.
Baldini started off again, and we moved as swiftly as we could through the warren formed by the rock-hard ash and mud. No Grenville.
“Where the devil has he got to?” I asked the air around me.
It did not answer. We returned to the flat area that Baldini had termed the training ground. Nowhere did we find a London dandy, slightly the worse for wear, engaged in battle with our assailant or out of breath and impatient for sight of us.
Exhausting the area around the theatre and gladiators’ grounds, Baldini at last returned us to the forum, where we asked anyone we could find if they’d seen Grenville. All answered in the negative.
“Bloody hell.” I planted my walking stick into the earth. “He could have chased the man anywhere in this city.”
“Or outside it,” Brewster added, sinking to sit on an upturned stone block. “There’s the new town and then all the inns and roads between here and Naples.”
“You are pessimistic,” I said, my mouth tight. “I hope we round a corner and find him—maybe he will come striding back, our attacker in his grip.”
“Let’s hope the bloke got away from him,” Brewster said. “And Mr. Grenville’s simply resting from the chase. Don’t matter whether that chap can hear or not—he’s dangerous.”
I agreed. Also dangerous was letting Brewster run about with his arm untreated.
“We will take Brewster back to the inn,” I said, taking command. “His arm needs tending. We can return afterward and hunt for Grenville.”
“Allow me to stay and search while you care for your man,” Baldini offered. “I know Pompeii well, and you also could rest, sir.”
Likely I was looking as peaked as Brewster. “A sound plan. Do you need to rest a bit before we go?” I asked Brewster.
Brewster heaved himself up from the block. “I think it’s a bad plan, meself, but if I sit under this sun much longer, it will be the death of me. Send me pay packet to Em and take me out to sea and throw me in when I go. It’s beautiful here. My ghost might quite enjoy it.”
“Onward,” I said sternly. “You’ll not die of a broken arm, Brewster. Not in my employ.”
“He’s the Almighty now, is he?” Brewster remarked this to no one and marched toward the gate. He did not need to ask the way—Brewster was very good at speedily learning the lay of the land.
“Why do you think it a bad plan?” I asked once I’d said goodbye to Baldini, who assured me he’d said word the moment he found Grenville, and were through the gate and on our own. “Baldini can search more quickly than we can and he knows the grounds better.”
“Because who knows whohe’sin league with. We’d never met the cove before yesterday, and he has strange ideas about this Trevisan gent. What’s to say the man with the knife and this Baldini ain’t thick as thieves? That Baldini weren’t luring us someplace so his mate could have us? Our bad luck I had to fall on me arm.”
“I believe Signor Baldini is genuinely bewildered at these events,” I said. “He expected to take three slightly naive Englishmen through the ruins where he could show off his knowledge and boast of his connections to Ancient Romans. Now he’s been pulled into our adventures and told that a gentleman he respected is duplicitous.”
